


The therapy is in the action

by Stormwind13



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Chuck Lives, Crossword Puzzles, Gen, Hobbies, Knitting, Photography, Prompt Fic, Wood carving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-05
Updated: 2013-09-17
Packaged: 2017-12-25 16:34:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/955345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stormwind13/pseuds/Stormwind13
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chuck does have a hobby besides killing Kaiju. Actually, so does everyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, this was a prompt in the third round of the Pacific Rim Kink Meme, but I haven't figured out how to link things yet. So the prompt was: Cooking, sudoku, encyclopedic knowledge of Cretaceous plant life, I do not care. I refuse to believe this kid has no hobbies that could make him a legitimately interesting human being outside of a Conn-pod.

**1.**

_click, click_

The sounds formed some of his earliest childhood memories, a soothing repetition that had chased away bad dreams and eased fevers. He would sit with her in their living room, head on her thigh and watch at the yarn turned from a ball of string into something new. 

_click, click_

He had thought it was magic, that the clicking as the needles would softly hit each other was some sort of beacon to guide his dad home - she only ever knitted while Herc was gone and the yarn and needles would vanish when he was home. The needles were the background music of his childhood, mixed in with the sound of his dad's boots and dog tags, his parents' laughter. 

 

**2.**

Sleeping at the base was cold and lonely - his dad was gone all of the time and the other kids on the base were too scarred by their own losses to care about his. But mostly, at night while he was alone in the quarters that they shared with Uncle Scott, it was silent. 

 

**3.**

He found them in the base commissary at the back, shoved in behind old toys and movies (who had time for things like that when the world was ending?). The clerk barely glanced at him when he shoved them at her, along with the only three balls of yarn that he could find. They cost almost all of the allowance money that his dad left on the table for him every week, but when he made it back to his room and managed the slip knot that he'd been taught how to do before everything fell apart, it was worth it.

 

**4.**

The needles and yarn stayed with him for three moves and two continents before his dad found them while they were packing again - whatever he was making was stuffed in a bag, the needle shoved into the ball of yarn (green this time). Chuck froze as his dad gently ran a hand over the items, his face carefully blank, before his dad packed them up in a box.  
(His dad didn't come home that night and Chuck knitted until dawn).

 

**5.**

He took the needles with him to the Academy, regulations be damned, because he wasn't going to spend all his time punching things to keep his temper under control. For the first ten weeks, he was too tired to do anything but his work and fall asleep almost instantly - no amount of home training could prepare him for the sheer amount of pressure that the cadets were under. By the time he got his feet back under him, he'd well and truly isolated himself, though not on purpose. 

But a combination of youth, arrogance and sheer pigheadedness had done the job; Mako was the only one who would talk to him and she was only on base temporarily, while the Marshall inspected the groups of cadets that were going to graduate within the next few months. He didn't mind Mako, not even when he would grab his needles and retreat to a nook at the top of the mock Jaeger bay. She'd follow and sit in silence while he knitted, her carving knife a counterpoint to his needles. 

(By the time she and the Marshall left, she was wearing a scarf of blue and green. He had a small wooden kangaroo stuffed into his pocket. Chuck tried to tell himself that the nook wasn't lonely with just one person in it.)

 

**6.**

Chuck had only been able to watch, gut clenched, as Lucky Seven stumbled and then went down. The cadets around him who knew him moved away, leaving him standing in a ring. He refused to move, even as his fingers shaped themselves into position to hold his needles. He waits until the fight is over before he heads back to his room, grab his needles and yarn, and retreats to his nook. He stays up there until after lights out is called and through two watch rotations before he slips down and makes it back to his bunk.  
He isn't allowed to go see his dad while he's in the hospital and his uncle doesn't pick up his phone when he calls. He stops studying, only shows up to classes intermittently and when he isn't in classes, he's up in his nook, knitting. 

(He only learns about the court martial and broken neural handshake later. Herc doesn't find the scarfs and lumpy sweater that Chuck made until he's packing up to leave Hong Kong).

 

**7.**

Chuck finishes the blanket that he started back in Sydney while he's stuck in his hospital bed recovering from nearly dying after getting tossed out of Striker Eureka. It's nearly the size of the floor of their quarters (he had to start getting the techs to vacuum pack it around the time he turned fifteen) and made up of so many clashing colors that it makes his eyes hurt. 

Herc hangs it on the ceiling of the house that they share in Sydney.


	2. Heated Metal

**1.**

Her father was a sword maker, like his father before him, and his father before him. Mako was a girl and an only child but her father had already begun to teach her his craft, despite the objections of the family. To her, home always had the faint smell of heated metal. 

 

**2.**

It took them three days to find her parents' bodies - crushed under a building nearly a mile from where she had been found. Mako couldn't cry, to desperate to hold onto the shell of numbness that she had wrapped herself in. It was another week before she was left in the orphanage - the house and forge given to her uncle, a younger son, but one that had had a son as well. Mako's fists never stopped clenching when she thought of her cousin in their forge, learning what should have been hers. 

 

**3.**

It had been one of the technicians of Coyote Tango that had given her the small carving knife and a block of wood before shooing her into a corner and leaving her. Mako had stared at the wood, not sure where to start - she had been going to be a maker of swords, not a woodcarver.

(She ruined several blocks of wood before she had managed to make a recognizable animal. It was a fish and Tamsin had accepted it with all the solemnity that the occasion called for.)

 

**4.**

She improved, carving whenever she needed a break from studying or something to clear her mind. She continued with animals, enjoying the challenge that giving them life gave her. But then she starts carving knives, blades, her own knife bringing patterns and designs to life on their hilts and blades. 

(She tells herself that her wooden weapons are almost as good as the steel ones she would be learning to make in another life.)

 

**5.**

Alaska is just as cold as she remembers and now she's at even more loose ends than she was when she was twelve - for one thing, Sensei doesn't insist that she go with him when he has meetings so she's left to find her own entertainment, which she does in the library. That's when she sees him. She remembers Chuck, vaguely, from the various other Shatterdomes, but she isn't sure that the angry sixteen year old would welcome her the way his angry thirteen year old self did. 

Except that he's lonely and she can tell that, so she follows him when he vanishes one day and finds him hiding, knitting. He glares at her when she sits near him but when she doesn't comment, he ignores her. She goes back the next day, bringing her carving knife and a block of wood. 

(When she leaves, he shoves the kangaroo she carved into his pocket without looking at it, but the tips of his ears are red and he looks happier than he did when she arrived. The scarf, she thinks, says the same thing as her kangaroo and she tugs the warm wool a little higher as the wind blows.)

 

**6.**

When she is assigned to restore a Mark III, she picks Gipsy Danger without a second thought and immediately goes about trying to make it as strong and resilient as possible. She spends hours arguing with the designers, the engineers and the work crews, all of whom see her as the Marshall's daughter first and a fully competent person second.   
She barely remembers to carve another fish for Tamsin and shoves it into her bag as she boards the plane with Sensei to fly to Hawaii. The funeral is small - Sensei's wish - and she gently places the exotically carved Koi on the gravesite an hour before they return to the plane. The flight home is silent and she spends the time incorporating a sword into Gipsy's design specs.

(She nearly cries when they start to install Gipsy's swords and for a second, the smell of heated metal transports her home.)

 

**7.**

She carves a simple crescent moon to place in the urn that she puts on one of the shelves of her room. She thinks that Sensei would have liked that. And then she carves Raleigh a camera, a simple one, but one that she thinks he will appreciate. Chuck gets a Koala this time and Herc an ostrich. 

(And, when they move to Sydney and her carvings begin to litter the house, melding in with Chuck's blankets and Raleigh's photographs, she thinks that maybe, hot metal might not be the only thing that signifies home.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am now going to do as many people as I have inspiration for.


	3. Memories in Sepia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raleigh's memories are stuffed in the bottom of his bag, wrapped in rubber bands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Should have mentioned this before - I don't own Pacific Rim and am making no money off of this.

**1.**

He gets the camera for his twelfth birthday; a gift from his grandfather. He says thank you and then shoves the camera behind the x-box games and Transformers. When they’re cleaning up he sticks the camera on a shelf where Jasmine can’t get to it and forgets about it. It’s not that he’s not interested, it’s just that there are a lot more interesting things for a boy of twelve to be doing. 

(He doesn’t get around to thanking his grandfather until he’s twenty and been around the world once already.)

 

**2.**

He and Yancy watch the world start to end on an August 10th while Jasmine is at a friend’s house. It isn’t until after the footage cuts to a news anchor that Raleigh retreats to the room that he and Yancy share. He wanders around, looking at everything like he can’t really see it – he picks up the Godzilla toy that he had never really gotten around to throwing out and turns it over in his hands. The movies suddenly aren’t as funny as they were yesterday or even three hours ago. 

The camera catches his eye as he turns and before he can think about it, he grabs the camera and is out the backdoor before his mom can even start to form a sentence. The beach is three miles from their house and he stays there until the sun starts to set, snapping pictures of everything he can see.

(Three years later the dolphins and whales are dead and no one wants to go into the water – Kaiju Blue can last for months after a Kaiju attack and kills almost everything it touches. Raleigh sometimes takes out his pile of photos and thumbs through them, stopping when he gets to animals that only exist in aquariums now.)

 

**3.**

Naomi had been beautiful and Raleigh had wanted her, which, when he looked back at it nine years later, wasn’t really true. He wanted the idea of her, what she represented to his eighteen year old self, but he had never wanted _her_. Of course, even after the fight with Yancy, that hadn’t stopped him from tracking her down and convincing her to let him take a picture of her. 

(It isn’t until after she writes a book with a compilation of all the interviews she had with various members of the PPDC that he realizes that she used the picture he took of her as the headshot on the back of the book. He feels a little bit of pride when he sees his name credited as the photographer.)

 

**4.**

The camera is one of the few items that he always makes sure to pack into his gear whenever they get deployed somewhere else. And he always makes sure to take at least a few pictures of every new location they wind up at. Sometimes he convinces the other pilots to pose for him and other times he only manages to get pictures of some of the support crew, but he always has a picture of the personnel of whatever Shatterdome they happen to be at.

(Tendo snaps a picture of the two of them at the LA Shatterdome three months before Knifehead. Raleigh doesn’t get that roll of film developed for three years, two months and ten days. He goes out and gets blind drunk afterwards, the aching silence too much to handle.)

 

**5.**

There isn’t time for taking pictures on the wall, not when a person is working twelve hour shifts with barely enough time to eat and get six hours of sleep before going back to work. He uses the work and exhaustion to keep the memories at bay; he sleeps near the work to cover up the silence.

(He still manages to find a handful of pictures that he doesn’t remember taking, later. Mako puts them into and album that is stuck on an in table in their house.)

 

**6.**

It’s harder and easier to be back at the Shatterdome and Raleigh makes sure that his pictures are hung up as soon as he can manage it. The fact that he eats enough bread and milk to make himself sick is something that he can’t bring himself to feel too upset about; it’s been years since he’s had cold, non-condensed milk. 

He goes roaming with his camera after that, managing to get pictures of nearly everyone in the middle of doing some sort of activity. He gathers his courage in order to get a couple of pictures of the Kaidonvaskys; the Wei triplets are easier and eager to pose for him, as is Newt who drags Dr. Gottlieb into it as well. 

(He manages to catch the Marshall and Mako less than thirty minutes before they have to suit up for the run on the Breach. Chuck, Herc and Max’s picture comes while Chuck is recovering in the infirmary and can’t avoid it.)

 

**7.**

Raleigh spends the months that Chuck is recuperating and Herc is trying to get back funding either taking pictures of Hong Kong or sorting through his pile of photos, trying to sort through which ones he wants to keep and which ones he can get rid of. He isn’t sure where he’s going next, but he knows that he wants a fresh start.

(In the end it doesn’t matter, because most of the rooms in the house have at least one of his pictures and the end tables have Mako’s knick knacks and Chuck's blankets are everywhere. So Raleigh starts to organize his photos into albums, because he doesn’t know a better way to say that this is home now.)


	4. Faded Pencil Lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angela loved crosswords

**1.**

Herc actually didn't particularly like crosswords - he had never been the top of his class in spelling and he didn’t care for trivia, so they were two separate forms of torture rolled into one, requiring that he take several days to even make it through one. 

(Angela had loved them and while Chuck shoved blankets, scarves and sweaters into various storage lockers, Herc had books full of finished crosswords.)

 

**2.**

It wasn't until he signed up with the PPDC with Scott that he started filling them out. There was only so much to do while you were waiting for another brain scan or for your next physical evaluation, so Herc had picked up one of the crossword books scattered around the waiting room. 

(He had walked out with it after they had completed that round of tests. He'd nearly made it all of the way through before Chuck had ripped it to shreds and dumped it in the trash.)

 

**3.**

He got the next one after their first deployment; back then, every deployment meant at least another six hours in the infirmary, being monitored and checked to make sure that the conn pods weren't slowly killing them. Scott usually charmed his way out of them with a wink and a smile, but Herc stayed - he was all that Chuck had left, even if his boy spent most of his time hating him.

(The nurse had given it to him and said that it had been dropped off at the front desk. It was a cheap one and Herc was fairly sure that Chuck had dropped it off as a half assed apology. It would be the first of many, on both their parts.)

**4.**

Herc spent six weeks in the hospital after his failed drift with Scott, three of which he was under heavy sedation. He woke up to a pile of crosswords from Stacker, a full mailbox and no room left in his voicemail. The first thing he did was try and call Chuck, who managed a thirty second conversation and hung up on him. The second thing that Herc did was force himself through the crosswords in an attempt to make sure that he hadn't damaged anything mentally. 

(The scans will always be better at that, but Herc felt better as he managed to puzzle through the clues to figure out the words. The third thing he did was listen to voicemails, all from Chuck. Herc was sure that he had done something wrong, that his son is only able to communicate if they aren't actually speaking.)

**5.**

The flight from Anchorage to Sydney was long and Herc pulled out the last of his crosswords in an effort to distract from the quiet conversation that the pilots were having. He'd almost finished one (proper names) and paused when he saw the last one: "messenger of God, feminine", before he shoved it back in his pocket and spent the rest of the flight staring out the window.

(He tossed the book in the finished box before going to see if he could track down some hard liquor when the plane landed.)

 

**6.**

There wasn't time in between Sydney and Hong Kong to get more books and even less time after they get there to find more. Herc was forced to pull out some handmade ones that Angela had given him the week before Scissure. 

_'You might get bored, waiting.'_ She'd been laughing as she handed him the stack of papers - nearly twenty in all, more than he could ever finish before he was back. He'd folded them and put them in his bag, next to the photo of her and Chuck that he kept in his bag constantly. 

(Herc hadn't touched them since Scissure, not wanting to ruin one of the few things he had of hers.)

 

**7.**

Herc doesn't move from Chuck's bed in the infirmary unless he needs to go shower. Otherwise, Raleigh or Mako bring him food or new clothes and occasionally Tendo manhandles him outside to get some fresh air. 

After Chuck wakes up, Herc pulls out Angela's crosswords and works on them while Chuck sits there and knits, paper and yarn strewn over Chuck's bed and the rest of the room. Mako and Raleigh rotate sitting with them and the others stop by, Tendo bringing whatever paperwork that Herc needs to do as Marshall. 

(Herc makes the decision to move back to Sydney after three months and invites Mako and Raleigh before he thinks better of it - but he thinks, with a bit of time, that they can make something like home.)


End file.
